


Counterweight

by capalxii



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Crack, M/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 14:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1651979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jamie only has a few bits of scar in his single human heart, but he knows what it’s like for someone to never leave after they’ve gone." </p>
<p>Set post-series for TTOI, probably best described as emotional-PWP, in which Twelve refers to Jamie MacDonald as "wrong Jamie" and Jamie thinks of Twelve as "Not-Malcolm." Originally posted to Tumblr but cleaned up slightly since then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counterweight

The name “Jamie” falls from the Doctor's mouth strangely, in a way that Jamie's never heard and is certainly not used to hearing with _that_ voice. There's a weight to it he doesn't understand until Clara—he has other companions, of course he does he can travel through fucking _time_ and have all the companions he wants, and Jamie finally meets this one on a drizzly Wednesday afternoon after wheedling and threatening—until Clara shows him something on the little screen in the console room. Pictures of others who'd come before them, and short biographies; the TARDIS is careful not to let them see anyone who comes after them, or read their own stories.

The weight is a memory. Jamie understands that weight.

*

Jamie had met the Doctor after he'd tried to put out his cigarette on a Dalek. In Jamie's defense, he hadn't been wearing his glasses and had thought it was a weird new shape of ash tray-slash-rubbish bin rather than one of those things that kept trying to destroy Earth. In not-so-much-of-a-defense, Jamie probably would have still tried to put his cigarette out on it had he been able to see it properly. It was a Dalek, after all, and he had some sharp words and un-empty threats for the Daleks that he'd been saving up for years. He didn't get the chance because Malcolm had come out of nowhere, grabbed his arm, and told him, “Run.”

Jamie had not realized he wasn't Malcolm dragging him down the street to a big blue fuck-box until he'd actually looked in the eyes of the gaunt old prick who'd saved his life. The hands on his shoulders had felt like Malcolm's, but the intensity of his eyes when he'd said, “That was the single stupidest thing I've ever seen in all my years, and I've had over a thousand,” was vastly different.

“Fuck off,” he'd said, shrugging those familiar hands off his shoulders. Or at least he'd thought he'd said that; instead, the phrase that formed from his mouth sounded much more charmingly safe for work and children. He'd looked around and seen that the tight little box was—it was huge. It was impossible.

“Yeah,” the man who wasn't Malcolm had said. “It's bigger on the inside. Do you understand anything about different dimensions? Anything at all?”

Jamie did not. But he'd grinned a grin, the kind that Malcolm had dubbed his serial killer grin so many years ago, had said, “Oh, aye,” and had tried not to be confused at the way something in his then-savior's eyes had crumpled like sheet metal under a collapsing building.

*

The first time Jamie hears the Doctor call him “wrong Jamie,” he lets it go. It's muttered under his breath, after Jamie's done something (something brave, Jamie would say, but something the Doctor seemed to think was foolhardy). But it happens again and again, sometimes after he catches the Doctor looking at him in a certain way, as though he'd seen something in Jamie's features and was grasping at it, hoping to see it again.

Jamie doesn't think he looks all that much like the Doctor's original Jamie. But he's not as heartless as people think, and he understands; the Doctor is Not-Malcolm, no matter how much of a physical resemblance there is, because there is someone else and someone alien under his skin, but sometimes there is something in the way he says a particular word, or a look he gives, or the way he half-glares in a particularly grateful way when Jamie grabs hold of his arm or crowds his space and Jamie thinks his Malcolm is there. Jamie understands the punch to the face that is seeing a missing person in somebody else's eyes.

Being Jamie, he does finally say, “I'm not fucking wrong.” (The TARDIS has given up trying to filter him. He likes to think it's because she likes him.)

The Doctor looks up at him from the console, confused. “What?”

“Stop calling me Wrong Fucking Jamie,” he says. “I'm not wrong.”

And then the Doctor looks back down and a muscle twitches in his cheek, and Jamie's not heartless, not really, and his resolve withers. He looks like how Malcolm would get when things would be too much at work, when he'd wanted Jamie to step in and take over some thrashing they were giving somebody else without actually asking Jamie to step in.

Jamie pushes the thought of Malcolm looking that way without him around right out of his head and adds, more quietly, “Maybe you could call me Other Jamie instead.”

The Doctor, Not-Malcolm, the man who was there but really wasn't, looks back up at him at that, nods subtly, and they drop the conversation.

*

They're on Uranus (Jamie laughs about this for approximately ten million years, and a part of him is fairly certain the Doctor has taken him there because he had known Jamie would laugh about it for approximately ten million years), on a base floating in the atmosphere when it finally strikes Jamie to ask. He isn't sure why he hadn't had the idea before, but once it gets into his head, it sticks there like peanut butter on the roof of his mouth.

“If I wanted to go to a particular day, mess about with some things, we could, right?” he asks.

The Doctor eyes him warily, then snaps his gaze away and says, “No.”

“But-”

“You can't go mucking about in time like that.”

“You do.”

“And I also leave certain things well enough alone,” the Doctor says.

Jamie bristles with frustration and asks, “Why? When you know you could change things for the better?”

There is an uncommon amount of warmth in the Doctor's eyes when he turns back to Jamie, which just makes him bristle more. “Some things are meant to happen, no matter what you try to do to stop them—sometimes you just make things worse. Whatever it is you're thinking of fixing, you can't.”

*

This doesn't stop Jamie from trying to come up with loopholes. He thinks he's being sneaky.

He doesn't know why he tried; he'd never been able to be sneaky around Malcolm, and his intergalactic doppleganger is even better at sniffing out sneakiness.

“If you keep up with this,” the Doctor says, “I'm taking you home and leaving you there.”

Jamie grins with his hands on his hips and says, defiant even as all his careful plans are burning to ash, “Keep up with what? Fuck off, you wouldn't be able to get rid of me.”

The Doctor gathers himself taller, larger, and says, “I've conquered the very laws themselves of time and space, I've destroyed thousands of my enemies, I've won wars with the flick of my wrist. Why would I not be able to be rid of you?”

Jamie can be heartless. There are words he can use as weapons. The Doctor walks alone no matter who is with him, the Doctor has scar tissue on his hearts from every person who has ever burrowed into them only to leave or be taken from him, and Jamie isn't sure whether the leaving or the taking hurt him more but he has his theories. The Doctor could abandon Jamie anywhere in the known or unknown universe, but he'd never be able to get rid of Jamie.

Jamie only has a few bits of scar in his single human heart, but he knows what it's like for someone to never leave after they've gone and he grins a little wider and says, “Because I'm fucking adorable and the TARDIS loves me. She won't let you.”

It's a statement that bears more than a touch of truth—he really is fucking adorable and the TARDIS hates him somewhat less than she hates everyone else—and the Doctor glowers at him in a way that means he isn't very mad. “Just try not to break the universe,” the Doctor grumbles.

“Can't promise that.”

*

The Doctor comes to him on Sundays, after mass, after he's had a chance to eat. (The Doctor had made the mistake once of coming to him before he'd had a chance to eat. Once.)

The Doctor comes to him on Sunday, and instead of taking him to a place where he can get into a fight like usual, they go to a bright, sunny world where miraculously Jamie doesn't get sunburn. The Doctor explains it to him using technical terms he doesn't understand because he's a journalist and a master of spin and a fucking political enforcer and he doesn't do science—he smiles and nods and says, “Oh, aye,” and the thing in the Doctor's eyes isn't entirely pain anymore.

*

“What would you change?”

Jamie's startled by the question. They're in the console room, and they've just stopped a Dark Ages invasion by a fleet of evil potatoes—Sontarans, the Doctor had called them, but fuck that they were fucking evil potatoes—and Jamie is exhilarated and exhausted all at the same time. “I'd change my fucking clothes,” he says, eying his now-grimy suit with disdain.

The Doctor smiles a tiny, almost doting smile, the kind you'd give a small child who's said something precocious. “I've done my research, Jamie. I know who you thought I was when we'd met. What would you do to him?”

He'd go flying into battle for him with a scream and a drawn sword. He'd throttle him and knock him about the head, asking where and when he'd lost his everloving mind, what he thought he was doing and especially what he thought he was doing to himself. He'd shove him against a wall and apologize for leaving and blame Malcolm for pushing him away in the first place.

Jamie shrugs, frowns, and doesn't meet the Doctor's eyes. “Give him a hug.”

That makes the Doctor startle. “Nothing else?”

“You said I can't change anything.”

“But if you could.”

“You said I can't,” he says. But he allows himself a personal fantasy and a tired grin spreads across his face. “I'd save him.”

There is something unfathomably sad that flickers across the Doctor's face, but it's gone in a heartbeat. “You can't do that.”

“I know. But I like to pretend I could. Don't you?”

The Doctor holds his gaze for a moment, and then he's moving around the console with such deliberate movements that it almost looks like he's not the one in control of his own body. “I'm taking you home.”

*

Jamie expects to be dropped off at his flat. He thinks it's his own time, at least, judging by the weather and the makes of cars around him as he peers out of the TARDIS door. He gives her a grateful pat because he knows that the landing was all her and not the alien fucker who thinks getting the right decade is generally good enough.

It's not his flat. It's a tree-lined neighborhood that he knows better than he should, even after all this time—he knows which side of the street the brittle, fallen leaves blow towards in autumn, and who complains the most about the rain saturating their gardens, and he knows. He knows that door. “I thought you were taking me home,” he says.

The Doctor bites his lip before saying, “I am. It'll be a grand adventure.”

He blinks, rapidly, fat wetness in his eyes and a burn to his cheeks. “Fuck you.”

“How do you get around the filter? Really. How?”

“I told you, she likes me.” Jamie takes half a step out the door before hesitantly turning back. “Listen. You'll come visit your wrong Jamie every now and then, yeah?”

The Doctor leans back against the console, shoves his hands in his pockets and nods. “'Course.”

“Good.” Jamie steps outside and hears the sound of the TARDIS dematerializing, sounding ridiculously like a toilet flush recorded backwards, and he knows it's probably the last time he'll hear it for a long time. He pulls his phone out and texts Clara, asks her to give the old fuck a call because really, he is not heartless, he never has been, and he knows what that face looks like when he thinks nobody's looking and he can't stand the thought.

He knows what he looks like, too, dingy suit and blue eyes peering out from a dirt-smudged face as he walks up Malcolm’s path. He rings the doorbell and Malcolm’s there a moment later, eying him like he doesn’t quite believe that Jamie is standing at his front door. When Malcolm finally finds his voice, he says, “Fuck are you doing here?”

“Need a shower,” Jamie says.

Malcolm’s frown and furrowed brow might trick others into thinking he’s perpetually angry, but Jamie looks into his big, sad eyes and sees where he’s been. Then he’s moving forward, wrapping his arms around Malcolm’s shoulders, burying his face against his neck and smiling when Malcolm whispers, “Oh,” like the word had been pulled out of his throat with string.

It takes a second, but then there are arms around his sides, hands on his back, a sigh against his neck and a body melting against his. When Malcolm pulls him inside his flat, he looks around, sees the same open space and brightness that he remembers from years ago, and feels the weight of his memories of this place with this man on every possible surface. But there is something new as well, easing all that weight—a thousand futures, where even if he can’t change the past, maybe being there in the present is enough, and when he cups Malcolm’s face and kisses him, he feels lighter than he has in years.


End file.
